Stream On: The best of Father Brown
As with the Granada TV series ‘Sherlock Holmes,’ faithful to Conan Doyle, the 1974 ITV ‘Father Brown’ stories are my favorites.
The 2013 series Father Brown, about which I wrote in 2019, is still filming but getting long in the tooth, having abandoned its tenuous link to G. K. Chesterton’s original stories a while ago. Still there are the original short story collections in print, a 1954 movie, and a 1973 BBC series that follows the stories of one of literature’s greatest detectives closely.
/Not streaming /Archive.org /😎57%😌62% /1954 /NR
The Detective, aka Father Brown–Detective, is a 1954 British mystery comedy film directed by Robert Hamer and starring Alec Guinness as Father Brown. Like the even rarer American film Father Brown, Detective (1934), it is based loosely on “The Blue Cross” (1910), the first Father Brown short story.
I’ve been making my way through Chesterton’s stories in print—they remind me of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, but with a sense of humor. And Chesterton seems a better writer. Some of the Father Brown mysteries end to his satisfaction but apparently without a solution. That’s up to the reader’s interpretation of the cleric’s often oblique remarks. In “The Blue Cross,” unlike The Detective, Father Brown isn’t even the main character; that, is the master thief Flambeau (who is the only recurring character besides Brown in the print canon). But with Flambeau is “a very short Roman Catholic priest” who “had a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea.”
In The Detective, the police raid a premises at night and find a priest (Father Brown—Alec Guinness is great here) at an open safe: he explains that he is replacing the money for a parishioner. He is arrested and put in the cells but released when the monsignor confirms who he is. Outside he meets the erring parishioner Bert (Sid James) and convinces him to be a chauffeur to Brown’s friend Lady Warren rather than drive getaway cars. (This may explain the origin of Sid the chauffeur in the 2013 TV series.)
Father Brown is then chosen by his bishop to go to Rome for a conference, taking a 1,200-year-old priceless crucifix. He is aware that his rival, the arch-criminal Flambeau, whom he has never seen, may try to steal the cross. Brown sails to France and catches a train, worried that a “Jaguar salesman” who dogs his steps might be Flambeau. Father Brown meets a priest on the ship who is willing to help him guard the cross. “A danger shared is a danger halved,” the priest says. Red herrings—also laughs—abound in this delightful film, where Father Brown chases Flambeau, and the police chase Father Brown.
/Streaming /Amazon /★7/10 /On YouTube /1974 /TV14
“I had planned out each of the crimes very carefully. I had thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course I knew who he was.” (Reverend Father J. Brown, “The Secret of Father Brown”)
Chesterton published 53 “Father Brown” stories between 1910 and 1936, collected originally in six books. The 1974 ITV series starring Kenneth More (The Forsyte Saga) comprised thirteen episodes that closely follow thirteen of Chesterton’s stories.
The 1974 series, like the later one, begins with a treatment of “The Hammer of God”; a comparison shows the essential differences between the two. While the 2013 series expanded Father Brown’s universe to include a half dozen characters, all living in the fictional village of Kendleford, the 1974 series only has two recurring characters, Father Brown and Hercule Flambeau, as in print. Flambeau appears only in five episodes, and each episode takes place in a different setting.
The 1974 series cinematography is the dark videotape of the original Upstairs, Downstairs, but the sets were very good. The effect is that of reading the original stories, which seemed dark themselves.
And, as with the Granada TV series of Sherlock Holmes, faithful to Conan Doyle, the 1974 ITV Father Brown stories are my favorites.
Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon's prices. This column originally appeared on The Outer Banks Voice.